For fans of what came to be called “alternative music,” the discovery of new artists and bands felt like a genuine adventure before the internet irrevocably changed music consumption. A few official venues acted as guides—magazines like Trouser Press andNME, shows like 120 Minutes, MTV’s late-night showcase of post-punk, new wave, industrial, etc. Word of mouth, local zines, college radio, mixtape gifts, and the purloined contents of older brothers and sisters’ record collections went a long way. Many of us had access to independent record stores that stocked all sorts of underground oddities, often run by obsessive know-it-alls like High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon.
Venturing into that world could be an intimidating experience. But one dependable marker of quality hardly ever let young seekers down: the name of BBC DJ and curator extraordinaire John Peel. Peel’s influence on the musical trends of the last forty years is incalculable, and impossible to summarize in brief. (Learn about his legacy at this BBC tribute page.) From 1967 to his death in 2004, he recorded up and coming and underground bands in intimate sessions at BBC studios, and many of these classic recordings came out on his Strange Fruit label.
No matter the band, no matter the genre, the mysterious gray cover of a Peel Sessions release always promised something worth forking over one’s hard-earned lawnmowing money to hear. Peel broadcast and recorded Nirvana before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the mainstream; introduced his listeners to now-legends like Joy Division, The Smiths, and The Specials; gave Bowie his first break before his Ziggy Stardust fame; and played Bob Marley before Catch a Fire made him world famous.

Hunter Thompson entered this terra incognita [the world of the Hell’s Angels] to become its cartographer. For almost a year, he accompanied the Hell’s Angels on their rallies. He drank at their bars, exchanged home visits, recorded their brutalities, viewed their sexual caprices, became converted to their motorcycle mystique, and was so intrigued, as he puts it, that “I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them.” At the conclusion of his year’s tenure the ambiguity of his position was ended when a group of Angels knocked him to the ground and stomped him…
Hunter Thompson has presented us with a close view of a world most of us would never dare encounter, yet one with which we should be familiar. He has brought on stage men who have lost all options and are not reconciled to the loss. They have great resources for violence which doesn’t as yet have any effective focus. Thompson suggests that these few Angels are but the vanguard of a growing army of disappropriated, disaffiliated and desperate men. There’s always the risk that somehow they may force the wrong options into being.

Street art is a frequently dangerous game. The threat of arrest pales in comparison to some of the hazards long time practitioners describe. While other artists sketch in pleasant cafes, creators of large-scale street pieces often have no choice but to wriggle through ragged holes in chain link fences and climb to vertiginous heights to get to their canvases.
There’s a popular conception of graffiti artist as lone wolf, but when it comes to the perils of the street, there’s safety in numbers. You need a crew. Female street artists must draw on the power of sisterhood.
As photojournalist Martha Cooper notes in the trailer for director Alexandra Henry’s Street Heroines, above:

I think bringing women together empowers them and there’s been some resistance on the part of men…it has to do with camaraderie too. It’s not that they’re saying, “You can’t do it,” but they’re just not allowing them in to their inner group.

Freak Out! The Frank Zappa Story

Germaine Greer presents a profile of Frank Zappa, the 1970s icon of eccentric rock whose range of work included serious orchestral composition, film-making and social activism, particularly in the field of anti-censorship.